You can’t keep a good man down, as the saying goes.
It was good to see confirmation of John Kear’s return to club coaching with Widnes Vikings, six weeks after his departure from Bradford Bulls.
He’d been at the helm since December 2017, with the Odsal club having been relegated to League One after starting the campaign with a twelve-point deduction following liquidation.
An experienced hand at the tiller, he guided Bradford back to the Championship at the first attempt, and the following year, masterminded a memorable Challenge Cup win over Leeds Rhinos.
Fans of Sheffield Eagles and Hull will also associate Kear with Challenge Cup thrills after the former’s Wembley win over Wigan back in 1998 and the latter’s triumph against Leeds at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium seven years later.
He also led Wakefield Trinity to the late-season upsurge in 2006 which kept them in Super League at the expense of Castleford Tigers, his hometown club, for whom he played and later worked as conditioning coach.
And in 2016, Kear took Batley Bulldogs to the Super 8s, setting an example of above-weight punching which his then-assistant Craig Lingard has since followed.
It all started back in the early nineties with a short stint in charge of Bramley, and after taking on a role within the Rugby Football League’s player performance department, he led French side Paris St Germain in the inaugural Super League season of 1996.
Kear also coached Huddersfield-Sheffield Giants following the merger of the original Eagles with the West Yorkshire club in late 1999, led England to the World Cup semi-finals in 2000, was assistant at Wigan Warriors and had another spell at Wakefield, that time as director of rugby.
He has been coach of Wales since succeeding Iestyn Harris in 2014, and in preparation for the forthcoming World Cup, will take the Dragons across the Channel to Albi for Sunday’s international against France, of whom he was in charge for one match back in 1997.
It’s quite a CV, and it’s easy to see why Widnes, who parted company with Simon Finnigan on the same day Kear left Bradford, were attracted by that amount of varied experience.
He will officially take the reins on July 1, by which time the Vikings will have been under the caretaker control of performance manager Ryan O’Brien for seven matches.
Like Bradford, they are former world club champions who have fallen on far harder times, and while restoring the Super League status lost in 2018 will be a big challenge, Kear has never shied from one of those.
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